Global Evolution

by Steffen Schmidt

  “What do we do now?” Glasses-man turned to Tao and said, “Where are your parents?”

  “My parents work in Beijing; they can’t come.” Tao shook his head and glanced at Glasses-man’s parents who were standing behind Glasses-man the whole time.

  “The only thing we can do now is wait.” Pang Zi squeezed over. A middle-aged woman who was even chubbier than him had been with Pang Zi the whole time; she was probably his mother.

  “We don’t know when and whether the fog is going to dissipate.” Tao was still looking at the fog as he asked, “Chang, how was it out there?”

  “It’s very dangerous ……” Chang summarized his trip in a few sentences. “Almost all the plants and animals I met had incredible mutations, and they continue to evolve at a steady pace.”

  “We saw the same when we came.” Glasses’ father interrupted, “I guess we have to wait for the army to rescue us.”

  “Will the army even come?” Chang looked at his three roommates as he asked this question, and the responses he got were three pairs of eyes filled with uncertainty.

  In every apocalypse film or novel, the army had never been helpful in saving civilians. At the end of the day, whoever wanted to survive would have to rely on themselves.

  Moreover, visibility in this red fog was less than three meters, so the utility of firearms and tanks would be minimized—since targets could barely be identified by the human eye, sitting in a tank would make vision even less clear. The red fog basically masked any scoping abilities of weapons.

  As for aircrafts? Was it even possible to take off in an aircraft in the fog?

  That wasn’t even the worst part of this disaster; the most distressing thing was the unpredictability. No one would be able to anticipate how the world was going to change and who the enemy was.

  Zombies? Zerg?

  None of these creatures had existed on Earth prior to this fog, and Earth was still the same as before. However, all living creatures were undergoing rapid evolvement and it seemed like they were trying to challenge humans—the predators who had been at the top of the food chain for more than 50000 years.

  What humans needed to do was defend their dominance. However, what Chang thought he needed to do was to survive.

  “We might as well just go and occupy a convenience store.” Just as Chang frowned and pondered his next step, Tao suddenly whispered, “There should be enough food reserves, and it’s easier for us to guard a small shop. It’s too rowdy in school now, and sooner or later something will go wrong.”

  “Mom, what do you think of this idea?” After listening to Tao, Pang Zi turned and asked his mother.

  “I still feel like going home,” his mother said in disagreement.

  “We agreed to go to the convenience store,” Glasses-man’s father asserted before his son tried to say something. “It’ll be chaotic if there are too many people, but we won’t be capable of defending ourselves either if there aren’t enough of us.”

  “We agree,” Glasses-man and his mother nodded.

  “We also want to go with you!” Seeing that most people agreed to this decision, Pang Zi’s mother hastily shouted.

  “Chang, how about you?” Pang Zi and the others turned to Chang.

  “I will wait for my parents,” Chang said calmly with his eyes closed.

  Chapter 7: Wild Grass

  “Wait for your parents?” Tao was puzzled.

  “Yeah, my parents weren’t home when I went back, so I left them several notes in the house telling them to look for me at school. If I leave now, I’m afraid they’ll never find me.”

  “How long are you going to wait?” Glasses-man continued questioning.

  “At least until sunset,” Chang replied.

  "Then we’ll wait here with you," Pang Zi said. “We aren’t in a hurry, anyways.”

  Pang Zi’s mother pulled him aside immediately after Pang Zi said so. Chang knew that Pang Zi’s mother would complain. She was that kind of woman who would haggle over everything, but was usually not assertive—she normally agreed with the majority. However, she wholeheartedly cared about her son, otherwise she wouldn’t have shown up in school right after the red fog emerged.

  She didn’t want to her son and herself to be left behind with the majority of people, so she drew him aside and tried to rush Pang Zi to leave with her.

  Chang glanced at them, then turned his head away.

  “I don’t mind if you guys go first; I’m just going to wait for my parents here. If they come, we’ll go and look for you.” Chang seemed to be carefree, but everyone knew that without radio communication in this world, separation meant that they might never meet again.

  After listening to Chang, Pang Zi and Glases-man both showed unwillingness on their faces. Then, they got pulled over by their parents. One of their parents cracked a brief smile and said, “We shall go first then, good luck.”

  Without delay, they then left with their children. Their figures quickly became blurred in the fog as they walked away. However, Tao didn’t leave with them.

  “I’ll stay with you.” Tao sat on a desk around Chang. “I don’t get to see my parents anyways, so there’s no room in that little group for me to fit in. I’d rather stay with you.”

  "Huh?" Chang was surprised that Tao decided to stay with him.

  Tao was the most unsociable one in the dorm; he spent eighty percent of his time studying, so he rarely communicated with others. In addition, he liked to show off his mastery of different subjects, so no one really liked to talk to him. Therefore, Chang didn’t expect Tao to choose to stay with him.

  “Tao, are you coming with us?” Pang Zi’s voice came from the fog.

  “I’m staying with Chang; if his parents don’t show up before sunset, we’ll leave together,” Tao waved to the four dim shadows. The shadowy figures soon disappeared completely after someone responded to Tao.

  “You don’t need to stay with me; I don’t mind waiting alone.”

  “I know you’re just saying that because we don’t know each other that well.”

  “Even if we knew each other well, it still wouldn’t be worthwhile to stay.”

  “I just don’t want to stay with those two families,” said Tao as he reached to Chang with his hands open. “You got any cigarettes?”

  “No, I told you I don’t smoke.” Chang shrugged, “Do you even know how to smoke?”

  “I just want to try; the atmosphere here is too depressing. I’ve never smoked before because I didn’t want to spend money on cigarettes, but now the world is f**ked up, so who cares about money?”

  “That’s true.” Chang smiled and took out several candies from his backpack, “I don’t have cigarettes, but do you want any candy?”

  “Haha, candies are high-calorie foods and one of the scarcest resources during an apocalypse. Are you sure you want to waste it on me?” Tao unwrapped the candy paper and popped it into his mouth, and then slurred, “Do you want to know why I don’t want to go with those two families?”

  "Why?" Chang was also curious.

  "I lied. I’m an orphan, and they have two families, so there’s no way I can fit in…”

  "Orphan?" After listening to Tao, Chang’s heart shrunk and he unconsciously reached into his pocket and touched his father’s finger. Chang had only pinched them gently, but the tissue on these fingers had lost it elasticity, causing the shape of the finger to become deformed.

  "Orphan…" Tao looked at blood-red sky feebly, and then their conversation ended in complete silence.

  They waited for a while until they were bored. Chang went out of the classroom to look for his parents, then came back soon after and continued waiting. Time flew by, and after going back and forth a few times, the surroundings slowly darkened bit by bit. However, Chang’s parents still hadn’t come.

  “We can’t wait any longer, the world is changing too quickly.” Tao and Chang stood at the school gate, gazing at the wild grass that was shrouding the world.

 
“The height of the grass has reached our waist; if we keep waiting, we probably won’t be able to see the path by tomorrow.” Tao frowned, “It’s become more and more dangerous now. This place reminds me of the Amazon Rainforest. You know the law of the jungle; the night is ten times more dangerous than daytime.”

  “I know… we can’t wait any more,” Chang toughly nodded. Though he desperately hoped that his parents could come, his mind told him that he had to leave and there was no point of risking his own life waiting.

  At this point, most of the crowd had departed. They had probably found some safe shelters, since no one would want to spend a night in school.

  “Come on, bro.” Tao patted Chang’s shoulder after he saw his sorrowful face.

  “Let’s go,” Chang nodded, then he took the first step out of the school before Tao did.

  They both had strange feelings when they wandered on the street. Within less than a day, the humanistic atmosphere of the city had almost completely vanished. Wild grass was everywhere, and all sorts of plants had poked through the pavement and continued to grow vigorously. For the first time ever, the hard cement pavement gave into the vitality of these plants. The pavement was shattered and occupied by clusters of different plants.

  The street was even quieter. The onlookers on the street were gone; no one was foolish enough to wander around in this miserable red fog. After the initial panic, it seemed like they all had plans for themselves. Some stayed indoors, some sought help, while only a few wandered around idly.

  Chang’s and Tao’s goal was to look for a convenience store.

  Like many other cities, there were plenty of convenience stores and small supermarkets on both sides of the street in Kaifeng. Every few hundred meters, there would be one. Because it had only been hours since the sudden spread of the fog, most people were still alive. Being a store owner was a unique advantage in survival, hence most of the store owners had locked up their store before anyone else tried to occupy them.

  Unsurprisingly, Chang and Tao weren’t able to get into any convenience store they found. But when they walked past a supermarket, they heard a brawl inside.

  "Someone inside is fighting." The red fog had lingered for a few hours and its permeability was strong. Whether it be indoors or outdoors, visibility was limited within three meters. The two stood in front of the supermarket, watching the world in the red fog and listening to the curses and fighting in the supermarket. Each of them had different thoughts.

  “There’s quite a lot of food in this supermarket.” Tao knew this supermarket chain; it was pretty big and had a variety of food sufficient for hundreds of people for a long period of time.

  "However, it’s too risky to enter. There must be at least a hundred people fighting for food in there,” Chang frowned.

  “Yeah, it seems so.” Tao also frowned, “Let’s go, we can’t outcompete them, and it’ll be dangerous even sneaking in there.”

  “Yeah, let’s find another one.”

  Once again, their figures faded into the red fog. They were shooed out of some stores and finally found one that wasn’t locked. The two were delighted and were about to enter the store, but a person came out before they took the first step.

  “Who are you?” A person blocked the entrance, yelling and clenching an iron bar.

  Chapter 8: Bacteria

  It was a familiar voice; it probably came from someone Chang knew.

  “Hey, we aren’t dangerous.” Chang entered the attack range of this person as he finally got to see the face of that person.

  “Sir, it’s really you!” The person in front of Chang was indeed familiar. More precisely speaking, he’d met him this morning—it was the biology teacher, Qingshui Li.

  "You are ... Liu Chang?" Seeing Chang’s face, Mr. Li lowered his guard and put the bar aside.

  “Me too, I’m Tao.” Tao followed Chang, letting Mr. Li see his face.

  “How did you guys get here?” Mr. Li moved away and said, “Come on in.”

  The two nodded and entered the dusky store. The store was actually darker than the outside and filled with red fog. The electricity was cut off by the vines, making it hard to see each other’s faces.

  But after their eyes adjusted to the darkness, Chang and Tao recognized more familiar faces in the room—they were all students from the school.

  There were dozens of students and their parents, about 25 people in total. This small group was probably formed after the apocalypse, and then they found this store. The leader of the group was probably Mr. Li, the biology teacher.

  It seemed like it wasn’t just them that wanted to find a convenience store as shelter.

  Walking to the other side of the room, Chang found Pangzi and Glasses, as well as a bunch of his other classmates.

  “Chang? Tao?” Pangzi stood out from the crowd, “How did you guys get here?”

  “Stroke of luck,” Chang said with a grin on his face. “We were fortune enough to bump into Mr. Li while he on patrol.”

  “Good to see you guys.” Glasses came over from his parents with guilt written all over over his face.

  “It’s okay, we got lucky that nothing bad happened.” While Chang was speaking, he instinctively seized the gun tightly in his pocket.

  "What a relief that nothing happened.” Glasses nodded, "This place is safe temporarily.”

  “There’s no safe place on this planet now.” Mr. Li walked over and said. “The mutation rate of all organisms is too rapid; it’s even faster than that of the Cambrian explosion written in textbooks. With many species evolving at this rate, within three days, they will turn into predators…this strange red fog probably has the same property as the free oxygen in the Cambrian explosion. No wonder why biology was such a large aspect in the college entrance examination. Did they already know from the beginning……?”

  Mr. Li became quieter as he spoke, and the last sentence could only be heard by Chang, who happened to stand beside him.

  “What do we do?” Pangzi’s mother shouted. The teacher’s words caused panic.

  "I don’t know what to do either. Let’s wait and see and try our best to survive.” Mr. Li sighed, then he sat beside the shelf.

  Chang and Tao also sat on the floor after they talked to Pangzi and Glasses.

  Time flew by and soon night came without surprise.

  The world was in real darkness.

  Even when the sun was shining, the red fog was dense enough to block more than 70% of the light. Not to mention, the soft moonlight and starlight were completely absorbed by the fog. In a store without electricity, their occupants learned what pure darkness was like.

  Mr. Li had prepared for the darkness in advance, so he took out a lighter and carefully lit the two candles he had placed on the table before it became completely dark.

  “We need to conserve these candles. If the light is too strong, we will become easy targets for other organisms.” The candlelight drove away some darkness and brought relief to this quiet room.

  Under the candle light, Chang felt dizzy when he stared at the light source through the red fog. He noticed an unbearable itchy feeling slowly coming from his ankle.

  He found an empty corner and then removed his shoes. Through the faint light, he loosened the bandage that was wrapped around his ankle, and a wave of flesh-life odor immediately filled the air.

  “Oh god…” Chang almost got knocked out by the smell, but he forced himself to adapt to it. What he saw next was even worse than the smell.

  The wound was festering and oozing; it was a frightful mess.

  “Wound infection!” Mr. Li’s voice came from behind Chang. He stepped forward and held onto Chang, then he lightly pressed the skin around his wound.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “It’s itchy, but not really painful”.

  “You wound is infected.” Mr. Li was attentively watching the festering wound. “Do you have any medicine?”

  “There.” Chang pulled his bag over and took out som
e over-the-counter medications.

  “Do you have any antibiotics?” Mr. Li looked through the different medicine Chang had in his bag.

  "No."

  “Then take some anti-inflammatory pills.” Mr. Li once again looked at the horrible wound, then frowned, “your injury looks a bit scarier than usual. It’s completely different from a normal festering wound!! It seems like it wasn’t only animals and plants that evolved, but rather bacteria too.”

  Chang took out the anti-inflammatory pills. The instruction on the bag told him to have one pill at a time, so he poured another on his palm and took twice the recommended dosage.

  “Take some more, it might not be very effective.” There was still discontent on Mr. Li’s his face.

  “Okay.” Chang poured another two pills and swallowed them with bottled water from the convenience store.

  “Does anyone have rubbing alcohol?” Mr. Li shouted to the people in the dim room.

  His cry garnered no response.

  "I don’t think it’s that serious; it’s merely a wound infection, like the ones I would get when I injured myself as a kid.”

  “You also ran into rats and dogs when you were a kid; you clearly know they’re different now. You need to understand that the simpler an organisms is, the easier it is for them to have significant mutations. Bacterial mutations are already pretty common even without the surrounding of red fog.”

  “Is it that serious?” Chang’s heart sank upon hearing the bad news. If the tamest of animals could turn into the most bloodthirsty beings, then these pathogens could be much worse.

  “I don’t know, we’ll see.” Qingshui sighed and fell silent. The room became quiet again.

  Chang put his foot on a stool and left it unwrapped. Probably because the smell from the wound was overwhelming, no one came around. Even Qingshui went somewhere else, so Chang tried to move a little further to the corner to make the smell less noticeable.

  It felt as if time had come to a halt in this eerie silence.

  Chang was sitting in the corner by himself, and his head got dizzier and he began to feel colder and colder.